[a screenshot of a tiktok by @/toriand showing the op’s face in the bottom right corner, with text taking up most of the screen reading ‘the funniest thing brennan lee mulligan could do in this moment is release a “ceo of wizards of the coast” video. he is in such a unique comedy position in this situation and I think he should take advantage of it]
The thing that gets me about the idea that Molly's death was planned, other than you know, the fact that everyone was clearly fucking shocked in the moment and also my general bone-deep loathing of conspiracy theories of all stripes is that Matt's talked about how much it altered up his plans for the campaign. I actually thought about this pretty extensively both after the Otohan fight and during some of the buildup to the Apogee Solstice in C3, when we were talking a lot more about railroading. While I think it's possible the Mighty Nein never would have gone to the Augen Trust even had Molly survived, particularly since Caleb's backstory was dropped quite early, their response to Molly's death really cut that off as a possibility (both because they were particularly motivated to destroy the Iron Shepherds at all costs, and because they just wanted to flee and be with someone's family). Lucien was always set up as the BBEG, but the initial idea per the wrap-up was that he would be an ongoing antagonist. And, obviously, I think a lot of this works to the campaign's benefit - a big reason why it's so character-driven, in retrospect, is because most of Matt's plans had to be thrown out. I just made a post about D&D narratives, but I think specific DMs gravitate to narrower structures, and Campaign 2 does stand out as unique as compared to C1 and C3 in how a lot of the NPCs are introduced and the roles they play, particularly the antagonists. You would have to be deliberately ignoring everything that has ever been said in publicly available interviews and wrap-ups to say this, and on top of that you have to be some combination of full of bad faith and/or just plain old stupid.